Continuing Professional Development

Continuing Professional Development is known by a number of terms – Continuing Competence, Continuous Professional Development, Continuing Education and Maintenance of Licensure are a few used by English-speaking countries.

Whatever the term used, the concept describes the process countries use to determining whether an individual physiotherapists continues to provide safe, competent care by maintaining current knowledge and skills throughout their career.

Below are the Continuing Professional Development presentations given at the INPTRA 2015 conference in Singapore.

In Canada, Physiotherapy is regulated by the individual provinces and territories. In the province of Ontario, the College of Physiotherapists of Ontario has a mandatory three-part Continuing Professional Development or Quality Management program:

Practice Reflection: All physiotherapists are required to develop a professional portfolio and update it on an annual basis.

Practice Assessment: 5% of physiotherapists are randomly selected to participate in an assessment of their competency in their practice setting.

Practice Enhancement: For physiotherapists who have competency gaps (as identified through the practice assessment) and require additional development.

EU workshop on Continuing Professional Development (CPD)
The workshop brought together 60 experts in the area of CPD, including representatives of regulatory, professional and educational bodies and the European Commission. Among the issues discussed were ways to optimize CPD of health professionals to improve quality of care and patient safety.

Preventing small problems from becoming big problems in health and care
This research report is about engagement and disengagement and its implications for our understanding of the competence of health and care professionals.

It combines two pieces of work on competency and disengagement:

a literature review by Professor Zubin Austin of the University of Toronto; and

an empirical study of engagement and disengagement by Carol Christensen-Moore and Joan Walsh at the Picker Institute Europe.

Both pieces of work provide new insights into the triggers of disengagement and the ways in which preventive action might be implemented.